Now You Are This

From its twitchy pop beginnings early in the decade, this San Francisco band has gradually transformed into an outfit bent on undulating keyboards and repetition.

Numbers have released an album, without much fanfare, almost every year since 2002. In 2005, they abandoned the palsied pop they were known for in the Bay Area, considered and discarded plans to move to New York, and even took a short hiatus. They're re-energized here on Now You Are This, but they seem even further away from their first incarnation than ever-- once a lo-fi garage outfit, they're now a band built on keyboards and repetition.

Past reviewers heard XTC; I hear more recent groups. Right off the bat, it's the Mae Shi ("New Life"), Dan Deacon ("Hey Hey Dream"), and the Rentals ("Kosmos Love"). But those artists alternate their layers of static and sheen in more interesting ways than Numbers seem capable of doing. Numbers' songs are all flat planes; no angles or gentle curves to trace your finger along. They substitute those layers of static and crunch for sophistication, but there's little left once the sounds themselves depart, which is not to say that "songcraft" should always underwrite the sonic, but it would be nice to hear something in the way of dynamics or, say, structure.

Still, the band sometimes hits on a simple group of keyboard notes or vocal melody that makes them difficult to dismiss. "Fly on the Window", like the rest of Now You Are This, grinds on a fist-full of chords and five-word lyrics. But Dunis inflects dispassionate, Euro cool over the sustained static, and a slow keyboard line becomes almost languid over the course of its four minutes. That same dispassionate tone veers into tunelessness many times, but falls short of the Eleanor Friedberger school of monotonous non-melodies.

A good dance band they're not, though they have been in the past. "Everything Is Fine" has a "You Really Got Me" riff that could get hips swaying, but not swinging. And though it's more upbeat, the track has the same eternal hum in the background, as if their guitars have been moonlighting as Tuvan throat singers. That sound becomes grating as Numbers play on, but on "Liela Mila" the static becomes a sublime tonal meditation before it washes away, leaving behind a gentle hum for Dunis to sing over.